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Nov. 6th, 2005 03:54 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
the-slash-hound.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
nickngregPairing: Nick/Greg (eventually)
Rating: PG? (for now)
Author: the_slash_hound
Episodes: Post Grave Danger angst, as a start... Nick doesn't know who he is anymore, and he's not sure about Greg, either.
I wrote these, stimulated by the slash_100 challenge, but it's just a beginning really. (It's sneakily dedicated to slytherin_girl. When you work out who I am, you'll know why :P)
They work independently, maybe better than they work together... Not sure.
At the moment, just the two introductory parts that are here, with the third on the way... Criticism gratefully received, any ideas for titles, also, I'm BAD at that.
1.
The air still tastes like dirt, rich moist loamy tilth. Smells like certainty, like sweat and piss and fear and the beginning of the last three strangulating oxygen-denied minutes of your life.
As always, you wake, at almost the last minute, unable to breathe deeply enough to scream, flailing arms against walls that dissolve as you touch them, or reaching out to hands that melt away as you open your eyes. It's always the same, one or the other. An infinite variety of the same damn thing.
You wonder, suddenly, if one day you just won't wake up in time, and you'll dream yourself to death.
You pace the house, barefoot against the polished floors, and touch the paraphernalia of your life, skimming touches with your bite-roughened fingers, trying to reconnect yourself with reality.
This is my bookshelf. Ondaatje. Lorca. Doyle. Forensics. Biology. Birds.
This is my table. My bowl of fruit. Oranges, withering uneaten because you don't like the feel of the pith under your fingernails.
My couch. My chessboard.
My pinboard. Photos of your family. Your mother. Your father, smiling and stern at the same time. Sisters. Nieces and nephews. Holly, Andrew, Joseph, Chloe, Alexander, Michael, Kitty, Zack. Zack, who everyone says takes after you. You hope for his sake he has better luck.
Your brother, wearing some lame Dracula suit from a Halloween party, smiling with the urbane city lawyer version of your own face. In the mirror, the exhaustion dragging upon your own face makes you even more alike, the deeply etched lines and pallor all but obliterating the twelve-year age gap.
The others. Warrick Grissom Catherine Sara Greg. Some random shot at some party at Catherine's, all of them squinting into the sun. You can't look at that one for long, because it hurts, and you don't know why. Don't know why, but it's enough to send you off again. Pacing.
You walk a loop that winds through your apartment, and ends with you standing naked in the dark shelter of your open window. These are the accoutrements of your existence. It feels as though they belong to someone else. You're a ghost.
One night, about a week after you get home from the hospital, you recognise it for the ritual it is. It's a long farewell. Somehow, it just doesn't fit anymore, this life.
But that's wrong. It's a perfect life, populated by perfect people, and maybe you've never been the sharpest knife in the CSI kitchen, Jesus, far from it, ask anyone, but back then at least you knew how to feel, how to love them, all those faces that stare back at you from the wall. You think that maybe you let love go forever, the moment you surrendered hope, in that fatal instant when you raised the gun to your chin, under the ground. Damned yourself. Because why else would you still feel so alone? All alone in this dark house that isn't a home anymore. "Don't take it with you," you told the hard-faced girl in the prison. You wonder if she could see the walls still around you. The dirt still in your mouth. If she recognised the lie.
Outside it's a crisp, chill night in the desert, and Las Vegas is asleep, well, your nicer-than-average suburban street of it. It's so deceptively quiet. So safe. That makes you laugh, a strange barking sob of sad mirth, but then you realise you're crying, your forehead against the cold paintwork of the sill, because despite what everyone thinks, you're still lost.
You're not who you were, and you don't know who you are.
*****************************
2.
For the longest time, it was quiet, down there, just the sound of your own dragging breaths, the echo of your own terror, insulated and reflected back at you by the glass walls. So quiet.
And then suddenly there was noise, familiar faces, and touches, and the explosion, and the ambulance, the siren, the electronic pell-mell of the machinery telling you that somehow, impossibly, you were still alive. Your mother's sobs, your father's clasp of your hand, and his whispered repetition of your nickname, like some ironically belated charm against evil.
When you wake, it's light out, and quiet, again, and you don't know how long you've been there. It's difficult, waking, like sleep wants to keep you, smother you in its arms until you stop struggling. You can't hear your own breath, not like before, but the machines still trill quietly, and you'd like to believe that they know best.
His is the last face you expected to see, the one face that you knew, down there under the ground, that you'd never see again. Making your peace one by one with the parade of faces, that was the one that hurt surprisingly badly. Down there, you couldn't remember when it was that you last spoke. What you'd said. How he'd remember you. And that was a dying regret.
Only you didn't die, did you?
The machines prove it.
He's elegant, even in sleep, managing to compose himself round the angles of the stupid plastic hospital chair. Legs stretched out, so he's all limb. All long wrist and exposed neck. Beautiful. The sensible blazer rucked up to show the t-shirt underneath. You blink your swollen eyelids, trying to focus, but they took your contacts out around the same time as they stuck the needle in your arm. Your whole face feels like the skin's too tight, and they won't show you a mirror, the nurse's eyes skittering away from yours when you asked. You've pictured yourself with your whole face eaten away, or almost more terrifying, imagined looking in the glass and seeing a total stranger. The perfect, unscarred face of someone else. Yet another thing you couldn't tell your folks, because they'd think you were being over-dramatic, or worse, vain.
You can taste the sour metal tang the steroid drip produces in the back of your throat and wonder why he's here.
His stark, resting beauty vibrantly contrasting with your own soiled filth. Your body that still doesn't feel clean, but somehow inescapably fouled. Itchy. Painful. Wrong.
It's odd to watch him sleep, to be able to study freely that face that's at once so familiar and so strange.
Over the last year he changed, and it made you nervous. You've never been comfortable with change, especially not this, one of the constants of your life inexorably becoming something else, someone else, for reasons that you couldn't quite understand. He became more confident, more assertive, more focused, as though he was driven to change, for reasons you couldn't figure. You liked him the way he was, before. Goofy, eccentric, cute, even. Because that allowed you to maintain the distance between you, keeping him in his place, you in yours, safe, discrete, ordered inside your own head.
You missed him. Missed the way you were, together, before. Because suddenly there was no dropping by the lab and joking around while the results were processed. No loud music and louder clothes. He never came to you with outrageous case-breaking ideas any more. It was as though suddenly he'd grown up when you were concentrating on other things, and you resisted it, every step of the way. Your jokes became more barbed, the almost-flirtation you never acknowledged degenerating into delicately sheathed aggression.
You'll never know if he lost his innate joyfulness as part of that process, or you simply lost the ability to see it. You don't remember when you stopped being friends. All you know is that suddenly you became just another obstacle he had to deal with, and he became just another opportunity you didn't know you'd squandered until it was too late.
Down there, under the ground, you couldn't remember the last conversation you'd had, even though you tried.
You lie there quietly, and watch him, and wonder about it all. And you notice, with a weird turning over inside yourself, that he's been crying. There's a tear track, silvery down his cheek, lit spasmodically by the glow of the machines. It makes you think of secret shining trails left behind by snails at night, and it irritates you that you can't think of a better image, something more lofty, more profound, less tied to the dirt, the ground. There's maybe a time when you could have told him that, and he'd have laughed, maybe, but that time isn't now. Last year maybe. Last week, even perhaps, before you died. Buried and reborn. Snatched out of a coffin just in time. Or just too late. You're not quite sure.
But even if you could tell him, the words wouldn't convey the tug in our chest, the way your eyes urgently track the slow fall of that secret tear, hesitantly, inexorably. The resentment you feel at the hope that flutters to life just at his presence. And when his lashes flutter open, you pretend to be asleep.
It's a reflexive act of hiding, something you suppose maybe you're good at. Plenty of practice, one way or another. You breathe carefully, regularly, resisting the urge to peek through your lashes. And so, pretence becomes reality, and when you wake up again, he's gone. You think whether perhaps you dreamed him, and you're not sure then if it was a good dream or a bad one. And what that means. You're still thinking about that when the nurses come to dress your wounds.
That casual, elegant beauty. His long hands. His extravagant long-limbed sprawl.
The silent, secret tears. Why you're still hiding from him, after all this time.
Rating: PG? (for now)
Author: the_slash_hound
Episodes: Post Grave Danger angst, as a start... Nick doesn't know who he is anymore, and he's not sure about Greg, either.
I wrote these, stimulated by the slash_100 challenge, but it's just a beginning really. (It's sneakily dedicated to slytherin_girl. When you work out who I am, you'll know why :P)
They work independently, maybe better than they work together... Not sure.
At the moment, just the two introductory parts that are here, with the third on the way... Criticism gratefully received, any ideas for titles, also, I'm BAD at that.
1.
The air still tastes like dirt, rich moist loamy tilth. Smells like certainty, like sweat and piss and fear and the beginning of the last three strangulating oxygen-denied minutes of your life.
As always, you wake, at almost the last minute, unable to breathe deeply enough to scream, flailing arms against walls that dissolve as you touch them, or reaching out to hands that melt away as you open your eyes. It's always the same, one or the other. An infinite variety of the same damn thing.
You wonder, suddenly, if one day you just won't wake up in time, and you'll dream yourself to death.
You pace the house, barefoot against the polished floors, and touch the paraphernalia of your life, skimming touches with your bite-roughened fingers, trying to reconnect yourself with reality.
This is my bookshelf. Ondaatje. Lorca. Doyle. Forensics. Biology. Birds.
This is my table. My bowl of fruit. Oranges, withering uneaten because you don't like the feel of the pith under your fingernails.
My couch. My chessboard.
My pinboard. Photos of your family. Your mother. Your father, smiling and stern at the same time. Sisters. Nieces and nephews. Holly, Andrew, Joseph, Chloe, Alexander, Michael, Kitty, Zack. Zack, who everyone says takes after you. You hope for his sake he has better luck.
Your brother, wearing some lame Dracula suit from a Halloween party, smiling with the urbane city lawyer version of your own face. In the mirror, the exhaustion dragging upon your own face makes you even more alike, the deeply etched lines and pallor all but obliterating the twelve-year age gap.
The others. Warrick Grissom Catherine Sara Greg. Some random shot at some party at Catherine's, all of them squinting into the sun. You can't look at that one for long, because it hurts, and you don't know why. Don't know why, but it's enough to send you off again. Pacing.
You walk a loop that winds through your apartment, and ends with you standing naked in the dark shelter of your open window. These are the accoutrements of your existence. It feels as though they belong to someone else. You're a ghost.
One night, about a week after you get home from the hospital, you recognise it for the ritual it is. It's a long farewell. Somehow, it just doesn't fit anymore, this life.
But that's wrong. It's a perfect life, populated by perfect people, and maybe you've never been the sharpest knife in the CSI kitchen, Jesus, far from it, ask anyone, but back then at least you knew how to feel, how to love them, all those faces that stare back at you from the wall. You think that maybe you let love go forever, the moment you surrendered hope, in that fatal instant when you raised the gun to your chin, under the ground. Damned yourself. Because why else would you still feel so alone? All alone in this dark house that isn't a home anymore. "Don't take it with you," you told the hard-faced girl in the prison. You wonder if she could see the walls still around you. The dirt still in your mouth. If she recognised the lie.
Outside it's a crisp, chill night in the desert, and Las Vegas is asleep, well, your nicer-than-average suburban street of it. It's so deceptively quiet. So safe. That makes you laugh, a strange barking sob of sad mirth, but then you realise you're crying, your forehead against the cold paintwork of the sill, because despite what everyone thinks, you're still lost.
You're not who you were, and you don't know who you are.
*****************************
2.
For the longest time, it was quiet, down there, just the sound of your own dragging breaths, the echo of your own terror, insulated and reflected back at you by the glass walls. So quiet.
And then suddenly there was noise, familiar faces, and touches, and the explosion, and the ambulance, the siren, the electronic pell-mell of the machinery telling you that somehow, impossibly, you were still alive. Your mother's sobs, your father's clasp of your hand, and his whispered repetition of your nickname, like some ironically belated charm against evil.
When you wake, it's light out, and quiet, again, and you don't know how long you've been there. It's difficult, waking, like sleep wants to keep you, smother you in its arms until you stop struggling. You can't hear your own breath, not like before, but the machines still trill quietly, and you'd like to believe that they know best.
His is the last face you expected to see, the one face that you knew, down there under the ground, that you'd never see again. Making your peace one by one with the parade of faces, that was the one that hurt surprisingly badly. Down there, you couldn't remember when it was that you last spoke. What you'd said. How he'd remember you. And that was a dying regret.
Only you didn't die, did you?
The machines prove it.
He's elegant, even in sleep, managing to compose himself round the angles of the stupid plastic hospital chair. Legs stretched out, so he's all limb. All long wrist and exposed neck. Beautiful. The sensible blazer rucked up to show the t-shirt underneath. You blink your swollen eyelids, trying to focus, but they took your contacts out around the same time as they stuck the needle in your arm. Your whole face feels like the skin's too tight, and they won't show you a mirror, the nurse's eyes skittering away from yours when you asked. You've pictured yourself with your whole face eaten away, or almost more terrifying, imagined looking in the glass and seeing a total stranger. The perfect, unscarred face of someone else. Yet another thing you couldn't tell your folks, because they'd think you were being over-dramatic, or worse, vain.
You can taste the sour metal tang the steroid drip produces in the back of your throat and wonder why he's here.
His stark, resting beauty vibrantly contrasting with your own soiled filth. Your body that still doesn't feel clean, but somehow inescapably fouled. Itchy. Painful. Wrong.
It's odd to watch him sleep, to be able to study freely that face that's at once so familiar and so strange.
Over the last year he changed, and it made you nervous. You've never been comfortable with change, especially not this, one of the constants of your life inexorably becoming something else, someone else, for reasons that you couldn't quite understand. He became more confident, more assertive, more focused, as though he was driven to change, for reasons you couldn't figure. You liked him the way he was, before. Goofy, eccentric, cute, even. Because that allowed you to maintain the distance between you, keeping him in his place, you in yours, safe, discrete, ordered inside your own head.
You missed him. Missed the way you were, together, before. Because suddenly there was no dropping by the lab and joking around while the results were processed. No loud music and louder clothes. He never came to you with outrageous case-breaking ideas any more. It was as though suddenly he'd grown up when you were concentrating on other things, and you resisted it, every step of the way. Your jokes became more barbed, the almost-flirtation you never acknowledged degenerating into delicately sheathed aggression.
You'll never know if he lost his innate joyfulness as part of that process, or you simply lost the ability to see it. You don't remember when you stopped being friends. All you know is that suddenly you became just another obstacle he had to deal with, and he became just another opportunity you didn't know you'd squandered until it was too late.
Down there, under the ground, you couldn't remember the last conversation you'd had, even though you tried.
You lie there quietly, and watch him, and wonder about it all. And you notice, with a weird turning over inside yourself, that he's been crying. There's a tear track, silvery down his cheek, lit spasmodically by the glow of the machines. It makes you think of secret shining trails left behind by snails at night, and it irritates you that you can't think of a better image, something more lofty, more profound, less tied to the dirt, the ground. There's maybe a time when you could have told him that, and he'd have laughed, maybe, but that time isn't now. Last year maybe. Last week, even perhaps, before you died. Buried and reborn. Snatched out of a coffin just in time. Or just too late. You're not quite sure.
But even if you could tell him, the words wouldn't convey the tug in our chest, the way your eyes urgently track the slow fall of that secret tear, hesitantly, inexorably. The resentment you feel at the hope that flutters to life just at his presence. And when his lashes flutter open, you pretend to be asleep.
It's a reflexive act of hiding, something you suppose maybe you're good at. Plenty of practice, one way or another. You breathe carefully, regularly, resisting the urge to peek through your lashes. And so, pretence becomes reality, and when you wake up again, he's gone. You think whether perhaps you dreamed him, and you're not sure then if it was a good dream or a bad one. And what that means. You're still thinking about that when the nurses come to dress your wounds.
That casual, elegant beauty. His long hands. His extravagant long-limbed sprawl.
The silent, secret tears. Why you're still hiding from him, after all this time.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 12:27 am (UTC)I am in awe and it doesn't happen often.
Thank you for sharing.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 05:41 am (UTC)That's wonderfully flattering, and I'm very glad you liked it. These are my first Nick/Gregs, and I find I'm very influenced by other writers, but I'm trying to find my own voice in it. As well as Nick's - it's the confluence of the two which I'm still unsure of. I'm very encouraged by your comment though. "almost lyrical" made me SO happy.
*pushes you gently towards "What makes the desert beautiful" because there's writing there that's SO much better than this!!*
no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 02:39 pm (UTC)There's this quality of hovering between the 'old' Nick and the 'reborn' Nick that evokes such a feeling of frightened hope. I'm having a hard time finding the words to explain the emotion that this drew from me, which just means I liked it so much I'm speechless.
Am looking forward to that third part. Thank you for posting these two!
no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 07:56 pm (UTC)I'll be patient, promise. ;)
no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-09 01:50 am (UTC)I'm not sure about Nick's internal voice, but I find him so compelling on the show, so often he's silent, or inarticulate, but he just manages to express so much. So I like to think of him having this really rich interior monologue, noticing details about people A LOT, even if he doesn't always express it well/ at all. Or so I'm telling myself...
thanks for the encouragement!
no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 01:22 am (UTC)